Celebrating Saint Bonaventure Eight Hundred Years after His Birth

ONCE IN CONVERSATION with a colleague (a Thomist, who shall remain nameless), he remarked with surprise that scholarship on Bonaventure, like scholarship on Aquinas, seemed to constitute its own world. Scholarship on great figures like Bonaventure does form a world, even a universe, one that includes both the scholarly universe of the moment and that same universe extended backwards in time. In 2020, The Franciscan Institute at St. Bonaventure University published Saint Bonaventure: Friar, Teacher, Minister, Bishop. A Celebration of the Eighth Centenary of His Birth¹—but in order better to assess this work, a brief overview of some major celebratory volumes published in Bonaventure’s honor may be helpful.

In 1874, the sixth centenary of Bonaventure’s death, Fidelis a Fanna published Ratio novae collectionis operum omnium . . . S. Bonaventurae (Turin, 1874). This volume provided a fore-taste of and rationale for the edition of Bonaventure’s Opera omnia published between 1882 and 1902 at Quaracchi (outside of Florence). A new appreciation for Bonaventure arose from that edition since it included texts, such as his three sets of disputed questions, that had been forgotten since perhaps the fourteenth century, and it eliminated from Bonaventure’s corpus many other texts (especially of “spirituality”) with which he had long been associated. As that edition and a new Bonaventure emerged into print, medieval studies emerged more fully as a discipline, infused with energy by Pope Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris (1879). The twentieth century’s greatest scholars began a close study of Bonaventure with the new edition in hand, among them Etienne Gilson and a Franciscan friar he helped establish at St. Bonaventure College near Olean, New York, Philotheus Boehner. These two men helped found the two most important intellectual centers in North America for the study of medieval thought: the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto and The Franciscan Institute of St. Bonaventure College (later University). While Gilson is famous to many, Boehner is better known to students of Franciscana, since he helped establish the critical edition of William of Ockham’s works and a series to translate the works of Bonaventure at The Franciscan Institute. Both series are still in print and are still essential to teaching and research in the Franciscan tradition.

From 1874 and the foretaste of a new Bonaventure, we must leap to 1974, when a series of celebrations for the seventh centenary of Bonaventure’s death resulted in two great collections of scholarly essays. A five-volume collection entitled S. Bonaventura 1274–1974, published by the same college that edited Bonaventure’s Opera omnia, includes contributions by an incredibly distinguished list of scholars. The first volume opens with a citation from Étienne Gilson; the fourth volume with a previously unpublished note of Philotheus Boehner, who had died suddenly on May 22, 1955. The five volumes were arranged topically, covering Bonaventure’s portrayal in art, his life and writings, philosophy, theology, and a final volume that provides a massive bibliography. The volumes are still an essential reference point for scholars, given the exceptional quality of the participants: among them Louis Jacques Bataillon, Jacques Guy Bougerol, Palémon Glorieux, James McEvoy, Bernard McGinn, Anton Pegis, Walter Principe, Michael Schmaus, Fernand Van Steenberghen, Paul Vignaux, and Grover Zinn. The volumes seemed to be a who’s who, not just of the Bonaventurean world, but of the medieval scholarly world.

Another collection, entitled San Bonaventura maestro di vita francescana e di sapienza christiana, published in 1976, arose from a major gathering in Rome for the seventh centenary of Bonaventure’s death. Paul VI gave the initial address. Published in three volumes, the first volume includes nearly one thousand pages on Bonaventure’s life and general issues in his thought. Volumes 2 and 3 are briefer and contain essays focused on specific theological and philosophical themes. These volumes also include a distinguished international list of scholars (some of whom also contributed to S. Bonaventura): Camille Bérubé, Ignatius Brady, Jean Châttilon, Ewert Cousins, Luigi Pellegrini, and Wayne Hellmann—a friar who sought to work with a theologian named Joseph Ratzinger...